Hughes EchoStar XVII Satellite with JUPITER™ High Throughput Technology Successfully Launched

View the launch of EchoStar XVII. This brings in a new era of satellited delivered internet service.

VoIP with Satellite Internet?

In January ViaSat launched their new satellite internet service exede for the consumer base with download speeds up to 12 Meg and upload speeds up to 3 Meg. HughesNet will be bringing their new Gen4 service online by the fourth quarter with down load speeds up to 15 Meg and upload speeds up to 2 Meg. The capacity for both of these satellites is very large. Hughes plans on launching their new VOIP service with the launch of the new Gen4 service. The ViaSat exede VOIP service will launch officially sometimes in 2013 but there are currently a number of customers using VOIP services such as Vonage with the exede internet service.

Hughes has been testing the Gen4 system with different vendors to assure a flawless launch of their VOIP offering. They will be allocating a portion of the bandwidth to prioritize packets for the VoIP service. The HughesNet VOIP will also not be affected by a customer’s monthly usage allocation.

So how will it work? Well the latency will still be a normal satellite lag which is around 700 ms, but HughesNet will be able to detect what packets are for VoIP and put them in the front of the line, speeding up the communication times. So what about the lag time? Some may say that 700ms for voice communication is way too much and it will never work. Let’s take a standard local telephone call that is made on a land-line to land-line. This connection will have a latency of 30ms to 150ms. Now if we take an example of a cell phone call using the same example the latency can increase in the range of 250ms to 600ms, depending on service providers, and range. With services like Google Voice these times can increase to 700ms to 1050ms, which is the same range as a satellite internet connection. So in theory these lag time ranges are already in use today.

How our lives have changed

This time of the year I always get a little bit nostalgic about years gone by and reflect on the coming New Year. As a child I remember futuristic TV shows and movies about people communicating with each other using hand-held devices, space travel and big screen video devices. All of this was since fiction when I was a child. It is amazing that since fiction of yester year is now a reality. As much as I have seen in my lifetime of 61 years it is even more amazing what the next decade will bring. Today children are as comfortable with computers, tablets and smart phones as those of my generation were with a model airplane.

When I was in elementary school, I never dreamed that one day I would be selling satellite internet and TV services. Heck, back then there was no such thing as the internet and satellites were a concept. Today it seems that everything we do is centered on a mobile device. You will be hard pressed to purchase a TV that is not high-definition. Today most TVs are internet capable. This next year we can expect the technology of satellite internet and video delivered content to continue at a rapid pace.

ViaSat recently launched their new satellite ViaSat-1. This is the highest capacity satellite in the world and is designed to transform the economics and quality of service for satellite broadband. This service will be offered through WildBlue. HughesNet, which has always been the leader in satellite delivered internet for business and residential service launches their new satellite, Jupiter, in the first quarter of 2012. This satellite is similar to ViaSat-1 in capability.
DIRECTV and DISH Network both have current and future services that are dependent on a high speed internet connection.

DIRECTV has just released a media center HDDVR that has five turners and allows independent viewing of recorded material in four rooms. DISH Network has TV Anywhere that allows a customer access to their recorded material or live TV from anywhere a high-speed connection is available.

In a year from now when I look back to 2012 I wonder what kind of internet or video technology will have been the next leap forward.

Satellite Internet is About to Change

Forget everything that you have ever heard about satellite internet. With the recent launch of the WildBlue ViaSat-1 and the pending launch of the HughesNet Jupiter a whole new era of internet delivered satellite is beginning.  Jupiter is designed with more than 100 Gbps of capacity, representing a tenfold increase over existing satellites. ViaSat-1 will provide 140 Gbps total throughput capacity. This type of capacity will enable download speeds that will in most cases will exceed and rival phone DSL and cable connections. The accelerating growth in bandwidth demand and multimedia Internet can now be handled through satellite distribution for the next decade. This new era will also alter the Fair Access Policies of HughesNet and WildBlue since both systems will promote their streaming video capability.  

Satellite delivered internet has played a key role in businesses such as Wal-Mart and the oil and gas industry for years. The launch of the new satellite platforms will enable high quality residential internet service without incurring the cost of traditional business systems.

Watch the ViaSat-1 launch.

Long Time HughesNet Customer

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I have been a satellite internet customer since the days DirecPC when the system required a phone line for sending data. This was marketed as Internet services for remote users and those who could otherwise not access networks without expensive … Continue reading →